The whole Equity Audit saga is descending deeper into Veep territory. We last wrote about it a month ago, when a group of Urbana School District employees cast as the Equity Task Force (assisted by a parent or two) announced that they needed to carefully rethink the inscrutable problem of the Equity Audit provider. The main contenders, to remind you, were the Systemic Educational Equity LLC led by the tirelessly self-plagiarizing Dr. Dubiel, and the one-man show of Dr. Lewis, the scholar apparently believing that a link to an Iranian site of pirated books constitutes a valid reference in a peer-reviewed publication.
The embarrassment of riches!
The design of the decision making process, truth be told, is not especially subtle. Three quarters of the Equity Task Force are district employees directly reporting to the Superintendent: why would any of them care what the rest of the world thinks when Dr. Ivory-Tatum never hid her preference for Dr. Dubiel’s outlet? With no real convincing necessary, why not move fast?
So they did. On March 7, the district convened a meeting of the Equity Task Force which (reportedly) decided to recommend Dr. Dubiel’s SEE LLC to conduct the Equity Audit. The next day, the Board gathered and (allegedly) was on the verge of approving the deal. But the administration sensed that they don’t have a secure majority, and (seemingly) decided not to put the matter to vote.
All of this, we must emphasize, is a bit of a guesswork. Think CIA analysts trying to parse the vague rumors on how Politburo members mood impacts whether or not the Soviets are going to ship SAMs to Mozambique or suchlike.
Are you surprised with the secrecy and the lack of information? Open Meeting Act, you say? Let us disabuse you of some ideas: we live in the Trumpian era, and if USD116 officials learned something over the past five years, it’s that the norms don’t matter, and the pettier the issue at hand is, the more rampant would be their violations.
Look. The USD116 Superintendent presides over the budget of $100+ million. She favors a particular outlet eyeing $40K of our money for a predictably shoddy job. You think she would abandon this matter as it increasingly and publicly becomes an embarrassment? An egghead strategist would, perhaps. A real fighter, – never.
Asserting their power in the smallest of issues is the key, especially if the issue turns personal. As so Dr. Dubiel’s is still on our radar.
The district didn’t bother much with the appearances pushing the SEE LLC deal through. The Equity Task Force meeting on March 7 was not announced on either the Equity page or on the Board’s page. (Heck, it still is not mentioned there as of this writing.)
We conjecture a publicly accessible document with the date and time of that meeting is sitting somewhere out there, to legally cover the collective district ass. But if the schedules on the landing pages don’t list the actual date, it means that the web pages are not advertising, but rather hiding that meeting.
Needless to say, the pointers to the video recording of the ETF meeting are not available either. And the District IT folks are ignoring our queries, because of course they are.
The meeting of the Board, on March 8 was on the public schedule, but not streamed. At the announced time, the UPTV channel linked to by the meeting agenda was blank. At some point (an hour in? who knows!) the video started, but… without the sound. Was the equipment faulty? who knows again! The sound stream miraculously resumed as the meeting moved into the safe territory of discussing the pool upgrades and suchlike.
If you ask us what happened, we’ll refer you to well-known maxim: “what’s important is not what was said in a public meeting, but who’s recording it” (or not).
By the way, we are not accusing anyone here. Making mistakes is very human and forgivable. It’s just the sheer luck of the administration, that the right mistakes were made at the right time and the right place.
As an aside, for all the monies the district spends on its IT staff, products, equipment (check the budget, it’s a lot), the service they deliver is incredibly poor. The chaotic website is one thing, but keeping all the materials on Google drive which is unsearchable by any search engine (Google including)? Really?
Perhaps the district imagines us going there maniacally every day, to track what new documents appeared. Sorry to disappoint: we have daytime jobs. The very point of the openness in the government is that Javert-like obsession is not necessary to access relevant documents.
Further, the outlet the district uses to publish (sometimes) their meeting recording is youtube, yet another Google-affiliated product, notoriously good at spreading propaganda, but should not be anyone’s choice as the place to securely and reliably store public records. On top of it, as elsewhere, the district adds more of their own strategically placed human errors, mislabeled videos, etc.
Mr. Gutzmer, the district’s Chief Information Officer, is overseeing this mess: does he care?
Update (3.17) I guess our admonitions worked: miraculously, the recording of the most of the meeting appeared two days ago. Thank you, Mr. Gutzmer, CIO, for listening!
So, where do we stand now? Tentatively, the status of the Equity Audit in USD116 seems to be still in suspension. What will happen depends on the moral clarity of the few Board member refusing so far to accept the spectral vacuity of Dr. Dubiel’s infamous Five Strands of Systemic Equity ™ as our response to the injustices in our town. Cheers to them!
But the pressure campaign is on. The administration (again, without much subtlety) is trying to equate the purchase of SEE LLC’s substandard products with the racial justice, and the refusal to do so as a surrender to the hordes of CRT-fighting morons laying siege to the Board meetings.
The right-wing takeovers of the school board meetings, quite obviously, are not going to happen here, in Urbana. Still, the administration darkly warns that they might happen (well, they also darkly warned about the upcoming shortages of the well-remunerated school districts superintendents). The administration sent to the Board and beyond, very pointedly, the link to a long training video, on how to withstand public invasions of the school board meetings. And who forwarded this link to the district? Dr. Dubiel, who else…
We predicted a while ago that SEE LLC and their enablers would love a crowd of raging Breitbart commenters to show up at the Board meetings. That would allow Dr. Dubiel and her likes to present their profiteering endeavors as the fight of Good against Evil. Culture wars are good for vultures, and so here they are, as if on a cue.
We urge the Board to keep resisting the machinators aiming to profit off our desire for justice. Like the oil lobby using the war on Ukraine to push for bills relaxing US mining regulations, the equity opportunists are trying to get rich off the crisis of educational inequity.
Let’s not yield to them.